40yearfan

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Sage words form one of our neighbors to the north.

Sun, November 14, 2004

Stay home, you pathetic whining maggots



By Ian Robinson -- Calgary Sun





In the wake of the U.S. presidential election -- in which I cheerfully took
a Sun assistant city editor, who figured Senator John Kerry couldn't lose,
for $10 (a quick pause to gloat here) Americans disenchanted with President
George W. Bush's re-election romp back into the White House, continue to
deluge the Canadian immigration website.

How anybody can be unhappy with the president's re-election is beyond me.

Bush has my admiration in no small part because he manages to
simultaneously annoy France and Germany, not to mention those renowned
deep, geopolitical thinkers, the Dixie Chicks, Bruce Springsteen, P-Diddy
or whatever he's calling himself now, Gwynneth Paltrow and Ben Affleck.

(Interesting note about France: America invades Iraq without UN approval
and America is portrayed as a barbarian striding across the world stage.
Recently, France essentially invaded the Ivory Coast to protect its
interests there ... without asking the UN squat. Just pointing out the
hypocrisy.)

Plus, let's face it: France deserves to be annoyed by as many people as
possible, as often as possible, if only for encouraging Jerry Lewis by
telling him that he was a genius.

Not to mention for exporting snotty wine culture across the Atlantic so
that otherwise reasonable North Americans have turned into cork-sniffing
oenephiles -- although the word sounds like an exotic perversion, it just
means wine-nerd -- who can actually say with a straight face: "This is a
full-bodied Cabernet, rich with a full body tasting of plum, blackberry and
leather cooked on an oak plank."

Anyway, the day after the U.S. election, 115,628 Americans checked out the
site and those numbers haven't fallen off very much.

Before the election, some U.S. celebrities and numerous other Democrats
vowed that they'd move to Canada if Bush were re-elected.

I hope I'm not alone in gently suggesting to those considering coming to
Canada: Stay home, you pathetic whining maggots.

Particularly celebrities. Canada has suffered enough without having to put
up with any of the Baldwin brothers or -- heaven forbid------ Barbra
Streisand.

And frankly, I don't know if we can afford to feed Michael Moore.

Bad enough that Canada became a haven for the gutless wonders of the 1960s
who fled the Vietnam draft. I sometimes think that the draft dodgers
welcomed by the Trudeau government were a political virus that invaded our
body politic, and we still suffer the lingering effects of that illness.

Our nation's preposterous pacifism, belief in nonsense such as "soft power"
and fidelity to a morally bankrupt United Nations overrun with tin-pot
dictators and other left-wing idiocies, may well be traceable back to the
influx of thousands of the testosterone-challenged whose allegiance to
country was superceded by their allegiance to smoking dope while trying to
figure out the inner meaning of Beatles songs.

We have immigrants coming to this country who have been hunted from the air
by murderous Islamofascists in Sudan.

Some new Canadians survived the atrocities in Rwanda or old Europe's final
convulsions of genocide in the former Yugoslavia.

We have physicians from some parts of the world who are willing to throw
away their prestige and power in their homelands for the privilege of
driving a cab in Moose Jaw.

As a nation, we ought to welcome our share of people fleeing genuine
oppression, and those willing to gamble everything to secure a safe and
decent future for their families.

But welcome a bunch of spoiled brats willing to abandon their very nation
because they don't like the man elected to be their leader for the next
four years?

Geez, in my entire lifetime, there was maybe one prime minister I'd trust
to run a street-corner hot dog stand -- the rest of them weren't fit for
much more than compost -- but it never occurred to me to emigrate.

If we close our borders to anybody, it should be these fools. They'll be
easy to screen out.

They'll be the ones who are whining.

Djaughe

France Defends its Actions in Ivory Coast Clashes


Nov 29, 2004 Abidjan
France is defending itself against accusations coming from Ivory Coast that it overstepped its role as a peacekeeping force during clashes earlier this month involving the Ivorian army, the French rapid reaction force and protesters.

Lawyers for Ivory Coast President Laurent Gbagbo say a planned lawsuit against France at the Hague-based International Court of Justice is based on what they view as France's illegal destruction of Ivorian military aircraft earlier this month.

French President Jacques Chirac ordered those attacks after an Ivorian military raid in the rebel-held north killed nine French soldiers.

Ivorian lawyers say this was in violation of accords that allowed French soldiers to become a rapid reaction force to help end the civil war in the world's leading cocoa producer.

The destruction of the planes prompted massive anti-French looting in the commercial capital, Abidjan, as well as clashes involving protesters, the Ivorian army and the French army.

During the upheaval, dozens of people were killed and more than one-thousand injured. Two other cases brought forward by Ivorian civilian victims are pending, in courts in Abidjan and Paris.

A supporter of President Gbagbo who has worked on all three cases, Genevieve Bro Grebe says she believes France was preparing a coup.

"The complaint is about what France does in Cote d'Ivoire. People without weapons have been killed. I mean Jacques Chirac has destroyed all our planes. The international community should know what is going on in Cote d'Ivoire, I mean the truth."

France has denied trying to topple President Gbagbo, saying it acted to secure French citizens in the south and its soldiers throughout the divided country. More than four-thousand French troops are helping six-thousand United Nations peacekeepers maintain a cease-fire between the Ivorian army and rebels.

French Defense Minister Michele Alliot-Marie says she doesn't believe the case at the Hague has any legal grounds.

But she now admits French forces did open fire on hostile crowds.

Speaking on French radio late Sunday, the French Defense Minister said French forces made in her words "full use of their weapons" on angry protesters who were blocking French armored vehicles in several instances. But she says, those protesters, were armed, not only with machetes, but also pistols and AK-47s.

On the first night of the protests in Abidjan, November sixth, supporters of Mr. Gbagbo were caught in heavy gunfire as French helicopters tried to prevent people from crossing the city's two main bridges, while also receiving fire from Ivorian military positions. Several days later, there was an incident in which French forces fired into a crowd gathering around the city's main hotel, while a convoy of armored vehicles tried to return to their base.

A new DVD called "The Six Day War of France Against Ivory Coast" is selling briskly in local markets for ten dollars.

The DVD's producer, Gome Gnohite Hilaire, says France has in his words "worn out its welcome" in its former colonies.

"We have many people who have been killed and I want the world to know about it. Now I'm very glad to see the impact of this movie in Cote d'Ivoire, in Africa and in the world."

Airport authorities in Burkina Faso, where a summit of French-speaking nations recently took place, confiscated a pile of these DVDs from the Ivorian delegation when it arrived, prompting it to boycott the proceedings.

Brian in Mesa

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